After dinner the Prince came and disturbed the stiff ceremonial, which he hated from love of comfort, just as Victor despised it on philosophical grounds. "Verily, an archangel," Victor would often say, "who should remark the wisdom and virtue observed by mortals in all trifles at their session-tables, altars, receptions, must needs bet his heaven and his wings that we are worth a farthing—or at least something—in greater things; but we all know where the conclusion limps; and this very disgust at the stiff, pedantic, decent micrology and machinery of men is the humor of the satirist. Moral deterioration comes about, it is true, through trifles, but not improvement: Satan creeps into us through Venetian blinds and sphincters[[253]]; the good angel enters through the front door."—Agnola rewarded our hero to-day for his previous so well meant assiduity with a warmer attention, which was made more beautiful in his eyes by her ornaments—she wore those of the former princess, her own, and those of her mother before her—and by her whole state-attire; for he loved finery on women and hated it on men. His esteem borrowed a tender warmth from the painful fact that she confounded January's selfish intentions in his visits (with reference to the future Clotilda) with fairer ones, and that nevertheless one could not say so to her. How came it that Agnola reminded him then of Joachime; that the latter was the conductor of regard for the former; and that all loving emotions with which the Princess inspired him turned out wishes that Joachime might deserve and receive them?

With a soul full of such longing, he drove back this very day without ceremony to that Joachime on whose hand, as we know, he had left a slight wound. He said to her, "He must, as murderer and Medicus, look once more to-day after the wound"; but a charming new trouble on Joachime's face fell like sunshine with a warming influence into his soul. He was impatient to go out with her on the balcony, to talk about it. Out there, he in a few minutes made the gash and the December chill a pretext for taking the hand and the gash into his own to warm it. "Cold is bad for wounds," he said; but the fine fool would here have had his own comment on the subject. The vacant evening, the remembrances of the childish joys of Christmas, the starry heaven, looking down from overhead, which magically illuminates all dark wishes of man, like flowers in the night,—these and the silence surcharged and burdened his forlorn soul, and he pressed the only hand which human kind at this moment extended to him. He put the question to her directly about her trouble. Joachime answered more softly than usual, "I was going to ask you the same; but with me it is natural." For she had, she related, on her return found the luggage of Clotilda and the news of her arrival, and—which is the precise point—the clothes of her sister Giulia, which Clotilda had hitherto given a place among her own. This Giulia, it will be remembered, had expired on Clotilda's heart, a day before the latter removed from Maienthal to St. Luna.

A chaos shot through his heart; but out of the chaos only the faded Giulia took shape,—for Clotilda daily receded into a duskier sanctuary of his soul; her pale Luna-like image caressed with rays of another world his sore nerves, and he willingly suffered himself to believe that Joachime had her form. In his poetic exaltation, so seldom intelligible to women, the dead threw the halo which Clotilda diffused over her back again upon her sister. Joachime had to-day read over again the letter which Giulia had dictated to her in her last hour through Clotilda, and she still had it with her. Probably a heart full of unrequited love had borne the fair enthusiast down under the earth. Victor with gleaming eyes begged her for the letter; he opened it in the moonlight, and when he saw the beloved handwriting of his lost Clotilda, his whole heart wept.

"Good sister!—

"Forever farewell! Let me say that first, because I know not what moment may close my lips. The tempests of my life are going home.[[254]] I speak this farewell and my heartiest wish for thy welfare through my friend Clotilda's pen. Give the enclosed to my dear parents, and join thy prayer to mine, that they will leave me in my beautiful Maienthal, when I am gone. I see now through the window the rose-bush which stands by the sexton's little garden in the churchyard: there a place is given me, which like a scar shall testify that I once existed, and a black cross with the six white letters Giulia,—no more. Dear sister, do not, I beseech thee, allow them to confine my dust in a tomb!—O no! it shall flutter in the shape of Maienthal's roses, which I once so loved to sprinkle!—Let this heart, when it shall have dissolved into the pollen of a new eternal heart, play and hover in the beams of the moon, which has so often in my lifetime made my heart sad and soft. If thou ever drivest, dear sister, along by Maienthal, then will the cross peep out upon the road through the roses; and if it does not make thee too sad, then look over to me.

"It seemed to me just now, for some minutes, as if I drew breath in ether,—in little thin draughts. It will soon be over. But tell my playmates, if they ask for me, that I was glad to go, though I was young. Very glad. Our teacher says, the dying are flying clouds, the living stationary ones, beneath which the former glide away, but verily at evening both are gone. Ah, I thought I should have to yearn for death a long time yet, from one year of sorrow to another; ah! I feared these pale cheeks, these eyes sunk with weeping, would not prevail upon death, that he would let me grow superannuated, and not take away my withered heart until it had throbbed itself to exhaustion: but, lo! he comes sooner. In a few days, perhaps in a few hours, an angel will appear before me and smile, and I shall see that it is death, and I, too, shall smile and say most joyfully, Take my beating heart into thy hand, thou ambassador of eternity, and care for my soul.

"'But art thou not young?' the angel will say; 'hast thou not just stept upon this earth? Shall I recall thee so soon, even before it has its spring?'

"But I shall answer: Look on these sunken cheeks, and these exhausted eyes, and only shut them to. O, lay the snake-stone[[255]] on my bosom, that it may suck out all the wounds, and not fall off till they are healed. Ah! I have haply done no good in the world, but also no evil.

"Then will the angel say: 'If I touch thee, thou becomest stiff,—spring and mankind and the whole earth vanish, and I alone stand beside thee. Is, then, thy young soul already so weary and so sore? What sorrows, then, can there be thus early in thy breast?'

"Only touch me, good angel!—Now he says, 'If I touch thee, thou crumblest to dust, and all thy loved ones see nothing more of thee—'